Connections for Facebook

F8 is a regularly occurring conference hosted by Facebook for web developers and entrepreneurs. It’s also the social media platform’s venue for announcing new and upcoming features.

For the 2011 conference, Obscura created an augmented reality experience dubbed “Connections”. Attendees swiped their radio-frequency identification (RFID) badges to enter the experience, in which multiple overhead projectors mapped visuals to the floor, and an array of 3D cameras tracked the movements of people within the space.

Once inside Connections, circular visualizations, constructed from participants’ own social graph data, formed unique “fingerprints.” Colored lines extended from these circles to connect people who had one or more metrics in common: friends, interests, workplaces, schools, locations, birth signs, and languages. When two or more people with shared connections stood in close proximity, a slideshow of their mutual friends and interests appeared between them.

A large screen positioned behind the Connections space also shared aggregate data about the group, displaying common interests and profiling the most connected of the participants.